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  "She's why I didn't register. Marcy and the girls. I wanted them to have a decent life, a normal life. Now, I'm a suspect in a kidnapping. That's going to go down well with our neighbors. Think they'll let their children play with Jenny once word of that gets out?"

  "While you were at work that day, did you at any time go onto the school grounds?"

  "No, of course not. What for? I was building a bandstand. And I was trying to get done early so I could go by the deli and get takeout. I wanted to surprise Marcy. She's been fighting a bad cold, feeling rotten, and I didn't want her to have to fix supper. She could curl up on the couch and we could watch some kids' movie with Jenny, then go to bed early. At least, that was the plan. Of course, that didn't happen when you locked down the school property. I wasn't home early, I got home three hours late. And I didn't show up with the surprise of a sub sandwich. I showed up with the news that a kid had gone missing from the elementary school near where I was working … and the cops were going to blame me."

  "You were turned in by an anonymous caller—"

  "Anonymous! Right. Marcy's brother, Boyce. When we got married, we left her whole family behind. They were all a bunch of degenerate druggies and alcoholics. But he tracked us down and showed up at the house a couple of weeks ago. Wanted to stay with us, just till he got back on his feet. I threw him out after three days because he was using drugs and probably selling them. The 'anonymous' call was payback."

  "So you're telling me you didn't have any contact that day with any of the children? Not even one?"

  "Not even one. But I could have had contact with every single one of them and it wouldn't have mattered. I'm not a pedophile. I have never and would never molest a child. Go check my file and you'll see."

  He looked up into Nakamura's eyes, and must have been disappointed in the lack of empathy he saw there, because he dropped his head and said softly, "Okay, game over. I'm not going to sit here answering questions knowing you're not going to believe a word. I want a lawyer." He burped out a sour piece of a laugh. "And no, I can't afford one so yes, the court will have to appoint one to represent me before I am questioned. So go find my poor court-appointed attorney. I'm tired. My baby kept me up again last night. Just take me to jail and let me sleep."

  Nakamura tried to get the man to answer more questions but he refused to say another word. Finally, Agent Gomez brought in some papers to the senior agent, he read them, and ended the interview.

  "We'll talk again later, Mr. Goddard."

  "I'll be looking forward to it."

  Outside in the hallway, Brice looked a question at Nakamura, who shook his head, holding up the papers Agent Gomez had brought him.

  "This is his record. The facts of his story check out. Statutory rape of a seventeen-year-old girl. Eight-year sentence. Served five. That much, at least, is true."

  The agent shrugged.

  "Whether the rest is bogus or not is immaterial. The profile of the crime he committed doesn't fit the person we're looking for."

  Nakamura walked away and Brice stood there, looking through the doorway of the room where Joe Goddard sat chained to a table by his handcuffed hands. The word "crime" was bouncing around in his head, ricocheting like a bullet off a cave wall.

  He turned away toward the conference room/command center at the end of the hall and through the open doorway he could see the agents working. And the clock. It'd always been there, a big industrial-sized clock above the coffee machine. After Riley went missing, it had become in Brice's mind the countdown clock, ticking away the passage of minutes and hours like sand out the bottom of an hourglass. The face of the clock looked at him accusingly now. Almost two o'clock. A little boy's teacher saw him walk down the hallway, his friends saw him turn toward the bathroom … and then he vanished in a puff of smoke more than twenty-four hours ago.

  His cellphone rang. When he answered, the voice on the other end of the line didn't even say hello.

  "The sex offender — did he … was there—?" Bailey couldn't even get out a complete question.

  "Swing and a miss."

  He heard a shuddering sigh, then her voice came back strong. "I want to go to Riley Campbell's classroom."

  Chapter Ten

  There'd been no talking Bailey out of her plan, and in truth Brice didn't try all that hard.

  "When I touched that chair Macy Cosgrove touched, I was connected to her, I could see out her eyes," she'd said, talking fast so he couldn't interrupt and argue with her. "I didn't connect to Riley Campbell just looking at his picture, but what if I touched something Riley'd touched, like at school … sat in his desk? Maybe …"

  It was somewhere on the other side of a longshot. But right now, there were no other leads. And that clock, that accusing clock on the command center wall was relentlessly tick, tick, ticking away the little boy's chances of survival. He'd been missing more than twenty-four hours. With Joe Goddard no longer a person of interest, it felt better to try something, anything, than to sit by and do nothing at all.

  The school day was over so there'd be no children in the building. He called Melody McCallum to tell her they'd be visiting her classroom and she told him to pick up a key in the office. She couldn't let him in personally because she was at her doctor's office getting the brace removed from her neck. The one she wore because three men in a pickup truck ran her off the road six weeks ago. Three men who died at the scene.

  Half an hour later, he was walking down the hallway toward the grades-one-through-three classrooms in the north wing of Corruthers Elementary School, his heavy footsteps and Bailey's lighter ones echoing in the cavernous space. Even as tired and distracted as he was, he noticed the gold highlights in her hazel eyes when she looked up at him — eyes he thought he'd never see when "Sleeping Beauty" lay unconscious in the hospital after she put Oscar in her brain.

  "The last time I was in an elementary school, I was a student there," Bailey said.

  "I was a student here."

  "Seriously?"

  "Told you I was a homie."

  He stopped in front of a door about halfway down the hall. In letters six inches tall, a calligraphy sign proclaimed, "Melody McCallum, First Grade." He fished in his pocket but paused before he inserted the key he'd picked up in the office, remembering the teacher's description of her classroom zoo.

  "So … how do you feel about spiders?"

  "I don't like them. Who does?"

  "Melody McCallum."

  "And you know that because …?"

  "She keeps a spider in her classroom."

  "You're joking."

  "Not just any spider, a big black hairy tarantula in a terrarium."

  Bailey's face blanched.

  "She has other wildlife, too. A parakeet named Frodo, two gerbils called Frick and Frack and an aquarium—"

  "Full of piranha?"

  "She's growing a potato plant, too, just like my teacher did. Cut off one end of a potato, stick a pencil through it to hold it on the rim of a glass full of water and you can watch roots begin to form—"

  "I get fish, gerbils, birds and potatoes … but a tarantula? Why?"

  "She said she wanted to teach the children that bigotry in any form is wrong, that it's not okay to pass judgement on a harmless creature just because it's ugly and scary-looking."

  "Harmless? Those babies can bite."

  "It's like a wasp sting, hurts but not fatal."

  "The bite wouldn't have to be fatal. If one of those things crawled up on me, I would die of fright. If I had known there was a tarantula in the room, I … okay, I'd have come even if I'd known. But I'd have gotten drunk first."

  "Wait here. I'll go inside and cover up the terrarium with something, so you won't have to look at him." He unlocked the door. "His name is Bambi, by the way."

  "So maybe I'll want to pet him?"

  "She let the kids name him."

  "This lady must be one weird duck."

  Brice opened his mouth to say there was nothing weird about Melo
dy McCallum — then said nothing. There was, in fact, an oddness to the woman that seemed to reach beyond the fact that her BFF had eight legs and ate live grasshoppers. She was too perfect. It was like she'd bought a First Grade Teacher for Dummies manual and reinvented herself in that image. She wore a sweater that somebody'd spent hours appliquéing — maybe she did it herself — with an apple on the pocket and ladybugs flying up the sleeve. Her smile was as beatific as a statue of the Virgin Mary. When she spoke to you, her voice intonation and inflection sounded like she was addressing a six-year-old. And Bambi, of course. There was that.

  He crossed the room to the terrarium on the wall and at first saw nothing in it except a live grasshopper.

  “You are not long for this world," he told the bug. "You know that, don't you?"

  Then he saw the spider and literally jumped back a step. How a room full of children could concentrate with that … thing crawling around just a pane of clear glass away from them was more than he could imagine. It was the epitome of horror. Hairy black legs, moving the way tarantulas walk, the back four legs on both sides working in tandem. It was approaching the grasshopper, oblivious to Brice, but it stopped, turned toward him and he couldn't help a pang of cold dread settling in his stomach. The spider changed course then, crossed the terrarium to a spot just opposite Brice and began to crawl slowly up the glass wall. For a horrified moment, Brice feared the creature would get out of the enclosure. In which case, he would, of course, have responded professionally — he'd have run out of the room and locked the hairy monster inside. Then he noted the roof on the terrarium and relaxed. A little. Not totally. The spider had seen him and crossed to him and was now showing its belly to him through the glass, the horror of a face and the fangs that administered the not-fatal, wasp-sting bite. If Brice had been paranoid, he'd have sworn the creature was trying to be intimidating. It worked.

  He tore his eyes away from the beast and looked around for something to drape over the terrarium. He spotted a checked tablecloth on a round table in the corner beside the windows, where there was good light for the plants growing there. He moved the plants off onto the windowsill, removed the tablecloth and then draped it gingerly over the terrarium. There was a hissing sound from beneath the tablecloth.

  He thought he heard a small thump, like maybe the spider had leapt off the wall. What? In anger? Pissed because Brice had cut off the sunlight? That was ridiculous.

  As soon as it was no longer possible to see the hairy visage of the monster arachnid, Brice's mood immediately brightened, like the presence of the spider cast a darkening pall that made the room gloomy. He'd never allow his kid to sit in a classroom every day with a tarantula spider! He didn't have to worry about that, of course, because he would never have a kid in the first place.

  "Where's the spider?" Bailey asked when he opened the door.

  He pointed to the checkered tablecloth.

  "And it can't get out of there, right? There's no way for it to escape?"

  "There's a lid on the terrarium, and wire mesh under the lid."

  "Bambi." She visibly shuddered. "Let's do this so we can get out of here."

  It wasn't hard to find Riley's desk. You couldn't miss it on the far side of the room. Danny Keeling had said Riley'd asked to be seated there because he didn't want to be close to the spider. There was a big yellow ribbon on the back of the chair. Scattered all over the desktop and in a box on top were small items. A miniature Hulk action-figure doll. A rabbit's foot. An old locket. An equally old teddy bear. A threadbare baby blanket.

  He answered her question before she had a chance to ask it.

  "When I talked to Melody this afternoon, she told me about his desk. She said she'd asked the students to bring in objects that were precious to them. Things that really mattered. Then one at a time, the students set the items on Riley's desk or on the floor around it."

  "And the purpose was …?"

  "She didn't want the kids looking at where Riley wasn't. She wanted them to see something special, something they loved when they looked at his desk. And the yellow ribbon is there until he comes home."

  Brice didn't mean for it to happen, but his voice broke a little when he said "home."

  Bailey went to the desk, picked up the Hulk doll, then the blanket, touched the tattered ear of the teddy bear and said, "Some little kid is sleeping alone tonight." Picking up the rabbit's foot, she examined the motley fur. "This was a sweet gesture. I take back what I said about Melody McCallum being weird. She's sensitive. She loves kids and understands them."

  Then Bailey moved a one-eyed baby doll on the seat of the desk and sat down in it, though she was too big. Brice turned unwillingly to give the terrarium a onceover, making sure the tablecloth hadn't slipped off. When he turned back, Bailey was gripping the sides of the desk so hard her knuckles were white. Her eyes were fixed on something he couldn't see.

  He'd seen her look like that before, the day she touched the Adirondack chair at the lake and instantly looked out the eyes of Macy Cosgrove at the carnival. As he watched, Bailey's eyes moved, following the action of images he couldn't see.

  The impossibility of it, the insanity of it, that this woman could paint the future, could see out the eyes of … it only washed over him briefly and was gone. It'd taken tremendous effort, but he had finally reconciled all that in his head, had finally stopped trying to fit demonstrable reality into the shape of his personal belief system about how the universe operated.

  From the look on Bailey's contorted face, it was clear she wasn't watching a Hallmark Channel movie. Brice felt a hole open up in his belly and a chilly breeze blow through. Whatever was happening to Riley Campbell, whatever Bailey was living with him at that moment as she saw the world through his eyes, it was a nightmare.

  Chapter Eleven

  The breath Bailey inhales is full of the most horrifying stench imaginable. It is unbelievably rank and foul. An overwhelming stink, a gasping, gagging kind of reek, worse than anything she has ever smelled anywhere.

  She's looking out eyes that see a small hand with an angry red welt at the base of the thumb, the hand of the little girl in the wreck. Katydid.

  The dirty fingers are clasping a pink ribbon.

  The little girl is able to blot out the stink right now because of the piece of pink ribbon in her hand. She brings it to her lips and touches them with the satiny softness of it. She squeezes something in her right fist, hugs her fist tight against her chest, but she is lying on her side and she is only holding the object, clutching it, not looking at it. When she looks away from the ribbon, her eyes sweep across a small space, maybe three feet tall and ten feet long. Her eyes pass over a window and there's … it looks like a tree trunk is jammed up against it. The little girl crawls through the small space and her hand touches something that looks like … a covered light, like the dome light in a—

  It's the camper.

  The wrecked camper, upside down. There was a car wreck but she wasn't killed instantly. Katydid survived.

  She crawls across the ceiling where there is a wet mass of trash everywhere. There are empty cans of Vienna sausage and flip-top tuna, empty pudding tins and fruit tins. There are soft drink cans, too, and empty bags of chips. She crawls over the trash, digs through it and pulls out a bottle of water. She twists the lid off and looks up to the right, where there is light streaming in through a broken window on the other side of the camper. Woods, trees, the rocks and dirt of a forest floor. The girl then crawls through the trash to a spot where she has made a place for herself. A rolled-up sleeping bag for a pillow and blankets for a bed. There are toys, several small dolls — two or three inches tall, but their long pink-and-blue hair stretches down to their feet, and doll furniture, miniature to fit into a dollhouse. There's a scruffy brown teddy bear, too, and she draws it into her arms when she lies down on her makeshift bed.

  But it's wet. Everything's wet.

  She has stopped wondering why Mommy and Daddy went away and left her here
by herself in this place. She has given up trying to figure out what exactly she did wrong. Whatever it was, it was a terrible thing. At first she cried out to them, screamed as loud as she could so they could hear, promised she would never do another bad thing ever in her whole life if they would come back and get her. She promised she would be the perfect little girl, that she was sorry for whatever it was she did and she wouldn't do it again.

  But Mommy and Daddy didn't answer her cries. They didn't come back for her.

  A day. Two days. Three. She lost count after that.

  Something nearby started to smell really bad a couple of days after the wreck, not all the time but when the wind blew from the back of the camper. It was so bad, it made her want to throw up. That was before the storm.

  Two nights ago, it'd started to rain and she was glad at first because she couldn't smell the stink in the rain. But it rained all the next day and night. Water ran down the hillside and into the camper and got everything wet. Then she felt the camper start to move. It was totally dark and she screamed and cried and the water came in and the camper slid down the hillside and she thought she would drown — but it stopped sliding, the camper hit something, some bushes, and stopped.

  When the sun came up, she heard the humming, the buzz. A hive of some kind must have been in the tree or bush the camper hit. Wasps — bees and flies, too — came in through a window that broke out in the dark. They flew around and around the soft drink cans and the empty pudding cups. More and more of them.

  They stung her and it hurt!

  And as soon as the rain stopped, she smelled the stink. Worse than before, all the time now. It filled every breath, so foul she couldn't eat and vomited until nothing came out and her throat was raw and burned.

  She tried to cover her nose, but the stink was everywhere. Like the wasps. She cried and screamed and shooed them away, swatted at them. But they kept coming. She couldn't get to the hole in the window to stop it up with something and they kept coming and coming and she got under her sleeping bag to get away from them but it was wet and cold and awful there.